Chapter 45

My summer was not relaxing. In fact, if I were to describe my first year of university’s summer term? I would call it depressing. This wasn’t all bad though. While my life felt depressed and my anxiety rampant, I did end up getting a few resume boosters and completed 2 online courses with decent grades. Despite all that, I was happy to be back in university again. University just felt more right. It seemed like I was actively doing something towards my future.

Year 2 of undergrad was pretty similar to year 1. The most notable difference was that I was now a bit better adjusted to university life. LP and I had moved in together and found ourselves new roommates. We had nothing against the ones we had last year but we were on a different track as them. They had Co-Op. Which meant that during the summer and alternating terms, they would spend it at a work location and get real life experience. This also meant that their undergrad schedule looked very different from ours. 

One other key important factor was that LP and I now lived off of student residence and into a non-university associated suite. I remember this place well. It was 116 University Ave West. It was a nice place and around a 15 minute walk to campus. More importantly, we now had air conditioning. Which is what drew us to the place. However, it wasn’t without its flaws. 

There were a lot of things to complain about the residence we chose. The water from the tap was occasionally brown, there were ants sometimes that would invade our suites and the internet cut off around 3:00 AM in the morning every day for about 15 minutes for no particular reason. The last fact was someone LP and I found out because we had done quite a lot of late night study sessions. 

Was the late night study sessions because the course load had gotten worse? Nope. In fact, the course load was actually easier. So why the late night study sessions? We simply understood ourselves better and now knew the limitations of pushing our sleep schedules. In other words, we stayed up later because now we knew we could do it and still do okay in class. 

Going back to the easier course load thing, in second year, there were only a handful of major specific requirements now and most of our courses were electives. We had more freedom than ever. It was like we’ve passed their rite of passage. Now that we proved our ability to handle basic science courses stuffed to the brim, we are allowed to chart our own paths in science. 

Most people in second year science undergrad took the generic 5 science courses a term. A common trend throughout most science students’ entire undergraduate degree. If you do the math, this means they did 5 courses a term for 2 terms a year and graduated with a total of 8 semesters and a total of approximately 40 credits of full science courses. Now, do you need 40 science courses to graduate with a Bachelors of Science? Nope! You needed far less than that. There were arts electives you can choose to make up a pretty substantial portion of your degree. Furthermore, there was one more thing to mention, you can take as many courses as you want before deciding to graduate. There was no upper limit, there was only a lower limit. 

This means if you had a trash GPA in first year, you can jam your transcript full of bird courses until it looks good and you can do this almost indefinitely. Well…indefinitely as long as you didn’t mind chucking your youth and money at the university. 

Now, there is a limit to how much you can exploit this. Of course optometry school and med school will take a look at how you did their pre-requisite courses and if they see that you took only 1 course a term and did well in it, they will get suspicious. So how do you exploit the system but not make it look completely broken? Easy. You split up the hard courses you were taking. It made no sense to do 5 hard science courses a term. LP and I did relatively hard courses in first year and if you recall, I almost slept through my last exam. It was not something I easily handled, nor wanted to try again. It wasn’t hard to figure out what the plan was. It went something like this. 

If I take fewer hard courses in a term, I could spend more time studying for those courses and do better at it. 

In the prerequisite courses section of the optometry school application, there were a handful of hard courses which had pretty low class averages. So what I would do is, I would take only 2 or 3 of those hard courses at a time, instead of taking 5 of them all at once. The other slots? I would fill in with some easier courses. The idea is that when exam time comes around, I would have much more time to study for the hard courses and hopefully do better in them. 

In truth, this plan had already been set in motion with the two online courses I did in the summer. Both of those courses were “full courses” worth 0.50 credits and this meant I was already up 2 credits from what I needed to graduate on a regular schedule. While the two courses I took weren’t science courses, one of them was an optometry requirement and this gave me some freedom for courses. 

Now, was I the only one doing this? Hell no. In fact, aside from a few elite super geniuses, I’m pretty sure most science students did some form of schedule manipulation to make themselves look better. I wasn’t even the worst offender of this. I still chose a full course load every term and with an intention to graduate in 4 years. There were those who consciously decided to stay for 5 to 6 years in undergrad and others who decided to do part time course loads whenever a hard course was needed to be completed. 

Like I said, the only downside to this was trading your summers for a better GPA and paying the tuition of extra terms in school. Most science students gladly did this because the pressure was on. Even in just year 2 of undergrad, the applications for the first of the 4 science based professional schools were opening. Starting from year 2, science students could now apply to the Pharmacy program.